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Why can't I just tell an agent to plan my honeymoon or buy things for me?

AI ProductFuture of Work

Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Match the agent to the stakes.

Technically you can wire it up, but it will not be trusted yet, and for good reason. The blocker is not hallucination, which is largely a solved technical problem, it is stakes and trust: people do not want an agent that might book the wrong flight or charge the wrong thing to their card. The honest pattern is to match the agent to the stakes. Lutz started by imagining a health “nurse in your pocket,” found the stakes too high to be reliable, and moved to lower-stakes commerce like helping someone find the right ring or coffee machine, where an agentic workflow that cleans the data and searches step by step adds value without the risk. High precision with an agent is possible; you scope it to where a mistake is survivable.

The Edge: “AI Agents: The Future of Work?” · Podcast


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